


Shattered

by lunaofthemiste



Category: Battle for London in the Air (Roleplay)
Genre: Fae AU, Gen, I'm so sorry Oscar, Meta, small mentions of body horror and death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-16
Updated: 2020-12-16
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:33:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28098483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunaofthemiste/pseuds/lunaofthemiste
Summary: Oscar isn't sure how he was brought back to life, but he knows that something's changed.
Kudos: 4





	Shattered

Oscar had never anticipated cheating death.

The incidents leading up to his demise were still blurry in his mind, and he had a feeling he would never really understand what happened. He also figured he would never understand what brought him back and assumed that any consequences he currently faced were well-deserved. Escaping death was an impressive feat, Oscar doubted that it would go unpunished. He didn’t want to say he brought something back with him, because that was a terrible cliche, but things were different.

For one, he could barely sleep.

He did perform the physical act of sleeping, but he always woke up feeling tired. Part of that had to be the dreams he dreamt.

The dreams would always start the same. He was in a room seemingly covered with mirrors. The only thing that he found odd about it was that every mirror was shattered in some way. Of course, none of the mirrors were shattered identically - that would have been too easy. The reflections that each mirror sent back to Oscar was shattered and fragmented, but never exactly what he assumed he looked like. Instead, the picture was altered in some way - sometimes the clothes he was wearing were different, other times the background showed something other than the shattered mirrors that surrounded him.

When he looked closely, he could see scenes play out in each mirror fragment. He never really understood what was happening, mostly because he never stayed long enough to look. 

This night, however, Oscar was determined to figure out what he was seeing.

He walked towards one fragment he had picked out arbitrarily and tentatively put his hand on it. The other him in the photo looked similar enough, aside from the clothes, which were weirdly old-fashioned. As he focused on the image, the other him started to move, and scenes started to play out within the fractured fragment.

He was walking in a garden, one that he had never seen before. It was gilded and the only plant life he could see was potted in the ground. He turned to see Rebecca - not his Rebecca, of course, but Rebecca nonetheless. Her clothes were old-fashioned as well, and he couldn’t make out her expression. Worry, perhaps?

The scenes changed quickly in front of his eyes. 

A man with a gun, in the shadow of a manor.

A woman with some sort of metal-working tool.

Rebecca and Tristan, standing over him with worry.

His own hands covered in blood. He was holding a knife - _why did he have a knife_ \- and he looked up to see Rebecca and Tristan’s shocked faces reflected back at him. They were saying something, but he couldn’t understand, and before he could find out what happened, the scenes changed again.

There weren’t any clear markers in the next scenes, but he could feel the underlying tension - he knew that something was wrong.

The scene slowed again when he was once again on his back. He was in a bright room and someone, a man that looked familiar, was looking over him. Something in the man’s facial expression made alarm bells go off in Oscar’s head - all of his instincts were telling him to run, to wake up.

But he needed to know. 

“ _Do let me know if it hurts - it will be fascinating to find out whether your kind can feel pain_ ,” the man said, in a tone that almost made Oscar sick. He didn’t know what the man meant by ‘your kind,’ but it certainly wasn’t good.

He instinctively grabbed at his chest as he watched the man do the same. Oscar was only watching images, but he swore he could feel someone peeling his chest open, someone doing something that made his skin crawl and his vision swim. He didn’t know what was happening, but his breathing was getting faster and he couldn’t think and he pulled his hand away from the mirror.

Oscar awoke with a flash, breathing heavily, and grabbing his chest. He could feel his heart beating, which was a relief, and could feel, if he was careful, the raised scars that were still healing.

It couldn’t be real.

The dream wasn’t real.

But it _felt_ real.

There was something uniquely unsettling about it. Something almost too close to home, but something Oscar couldn’t describe.

He didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. 

* * *

The next night, against his better judgment, he tried to sleep again. As expected, the same scene appeared - the fractured mirrors, the slightly altered reflections of himself. He recognized the one he had seen the previous night and decided to steer clear of it, instead choosing to select one where he looked closer to what he looked like now. If he was smart he would haven’t selected anything, but he was curious.

This Oscar’s story started with him and Tristan - they were at some sort of outside gathering. It looked like a protest, but Oscar wasn’t entirely sure. Tristan seemed different, somehow - was he younger, perhaps? 

Just like the previous night, the scenes skipped forward. He saw Rebecca in what appeared to be a study, and probably in the Tyler manor if they had the same design sense. She had the same look she had when he first met her, cold and secretive, always one step ahead. It was good to see things didn’t change in this fragment.

He continued to skip ahead, noticing that the clothing style continued to change as he progressed. Several scenes were shown briefly: the man from the previous night standing over a body, someone’s face too close to him in what was probably a closet, a gunfight on a roof, Rebecca standing over him in the same closet. Oscar couldn’t figure out the point of all of it. In his opinion, the timeline of this particular fragment seemed stretched - how long was it?

Cautiously, he tried increasing his pressure on the fragment, which slowed down the scenes he saw. The one he was currently looking at was the closest to what he looked like now. He saw Rebecca and Tristan sitting across from him at a table. They were laughing about something, so Oscar did his best to listen in.

 _“I would be less tightly-wound if_ someone _but their bloody dishes in the dishwasher!”_ Fragment-Oscar said quietly.

 _“I forget! It’s very modern to have one,”_ Tristan crossed his arms, and the conversation continued.

From what Oscar could tell, this seemed relatively tame compared to the one he had seen in the previous night’s events. He tried releasing his pressure and the images flashed quickly across the fragment.

An explosion.

Someone standing over him. The same woman from the previous night, perhaps?

A freckled face.

A gun pointed at Rebecca.

 _His_ gun pointed at Rebecca.

Oscar pulled his hand away from the fragment, but he didn’t wake up this time. He was more confused than anything else - what did this all mean? What were the fragments trying to tell him?

He needed answers.

He wasn’t sure if he would get them.

But he had to try. He owed it to himself.

Upon investigation, another fragment showed him sitting on a beach with Rebecca and another woman that looked like Cordelia. The water in front of them was a bright blue, something that would never be seen off the coast of Ireland or England. They were all arguing about something - the ship sailing away in the distance, perhaps?

The fragment next to it showed the same freckled face, this time attacking him. They were in a garden, he was telling the freckled man that he was alone, he was just leaving. The other man didn’t listen and instead chose to attack him. Oscar pulled his hand away and not wanting to see the next events.

A third fragment seemed to be set in the future, based on the technology Oscar saw. Nothing was out of the ordinary until Fragment-Oscar started talking to a woman he had never seen before. The sunglasses she was wearing blocked her eyes, but something told him it was more than just protecting her from the sun. Her black hair was curled perfectly, and she almost reminded him of Rebecca - almost. Something about her was both harsher and dangerous.

Fragment-Oscar was arguing with her in hushed tones while looking back at Tristan and Rebecca, who didn’t even see him. Oscar immediately knew something was wrong, and that he was trying to hide it from his friends.

“ _You wouldn’t hurt her_ ,” Fragment-Oscar insisted. _“She’s rich, well-protected._ ” 

“ _Fine, maybe not. Money can buy protection for her, but for him? Probably not,”_ the woman smirked. “ _Time to make your choice_.”

Oscar pressed harder on the fragment, skipping past the choice. He didn’t want to know, mostly because he assumed it ended in tragedy either way. When he came to this realization, he stepped back, pulling his hand away from the fragment.

He woke up again, this time more confused than panicked. Nothing made sense - he wished it did, but it didn’t.

Was he always doomed to tragedy? He tried to be cautious - Tristan was so reckless and Rebecca was too, as much as she insisted she wasn’t. How come his choices ended badly?

He did always seem to bounce back, though. In the fragments, he had seen himself cheat death several times. Maybe that meant something?

“Or maybe it’s nothing,” he said out loud, feeling a familiar sharpness on his tongue that came with lying. “That doesn’t count, she isn’t in earshot,” he muttered, hating the stupid rules of giving your honestly to someone, especially since someone was asleep with her boyfriend in the other room.

In the end, it seemed that maybe it did mean something, but Oscar didn’t want to find out more. He was content to live his life, to ignore all the other ways these fragments thought it could play out.

All he could hope was that the choice wouldn’t haunt him.


End file.
